All posts by robbmichael

After 108 years the jinx was finally broken when the Cubs finally won the World Series, but now it’s looking like it was just a fluke. The stars aligned, luck was finally on their side, but in the end, they weren’t really that good a baseball team. At least that could be the interpretation based on the way they’re playing right now.

My favorite team, the White Sox are not very good this year, but they’re not supposed to be. They traded away two of their five best players and are ready to trade away more as they rebuild a team that has been mediocre, at best, for most of the last ten years. The White Sox are supposed to be one of the worst teams in baseball this year. However, right now they are far and away much better than the Cubs. Sure, the Cubs are four games better than the Sox, but the stats (see below) say the Sox are better, maybe it’s the competition. While the outlook is bleak for the Cubs, it would be even worse if they were in the American League.

They’re fortunate they’re in the Central Division where they’re in 2nd place two or three games behind Milwaukee. If they were in the National League’s West Division they’d be in 4th place, 9.5 games out of first. If they were in the American League West they’d also be in 4th, but they’d be 12 1/2 back.

Cubs fans are saying, “Not to worry, the season is still young, these guys will turn it around in time for the playoffs.”

Here’s my question for today: How much would you pay for this? It’s a Cheeto. Just one, not the whole bag. It does have an unusual shape.

Would you give someone $1 for it? Maybe $5 if someone else was going to buy it for a buck? Would you spend $100 for it? Can you imagine any scenario where someone would spend $500 for one Cheeto? It’s a Flaming Hot Cheeto, does that make a difference?

“This item is one of a kind! It measures about 1 1/2 inches in length (it looks sooo much bigger in the picture),”

Well, would you believe me if I told you someone has offered $100,000 for this Cheeto?

I’ve now jogged three days in a row. Today was interesting because I really pushed myself the first leg and went to tenths of a mile before I stopped. However, every jogging/section after that was 11 tenths of a mile. It also wasn’t much easier today. Just like yesterday, it was okay until things started hurting. One thing to note: the leg on the left side of that red square is all uphill, not a steep uphill, gradual, but noticeable. That’s where the agony starts. Other than that I know my body is going to rebel for quite awhile partly because I am out of shape, but mostly because I am old and out of shape.

I will probably take tomorrow off because first of all, it seems like a good idea. I’ve built some days off into this and I expect to take more off here at the beginning than I expect to once I am jogging well. Also, it is supposed to rain tomorrow and I am not a trooper yet, at least not one who jogs even when it is raining…

Forgot to mention this. Yesterday I added another picture to my end-of-jog routine: a picture of some bit of the nearby scenery when I finish.

I tried pushing myself a little bit today. Instead of jogging just a 10th of a mile I pushed the jogging sessions to eleven tenths of a mile. Then I walked .09.

It was painful. I’ll describe a little of it: first, of all of my tibia hurts which surprises me and my feet hurt a little bit which doesn’t surprise me. The worst, though, is about halfway through, jogging that .11 mile starts getting difficult. I’m at the point where I have all I can do to get to the point where I see that .55 or .77 show up on my tracking app. I am breathing heavily, straining for air.

I don’t remember this much difficulty or agony when I started jogging the first time I did this much jogging 35 years ago. In fact, the very first time I jogged I was out for two hours, running almost the entire time. I thought… this is really easy… at least until I woke up the next morning and few if any muscles did not hurt. Still, when the next time I jogged after a few days, even though I took it easier, it didn’t seem as hard to cover a block or two, my legs didn’t hurt as much, and it didn’t seem to be as difficult to get them to move.

I sometimes forget I am not young anymore and I’ve never had a dog named Toto either.

My first day jogging in more than five years. Once upon a time, half my lifetime ago, I was a jogger, a real jogger, at least an hour, often two hours seven days a week. That was just for three years until I moved from Wisconsin to Maryland and my surroundings and routine changed and I stopped. Through the years I tried picking it up a number of times, but it never lasted more than a few weeks. Maybe I needed better scenery or greater familiarity with my surroundings or a form of accountability.

The last time I made a grand effort to jog everything seemed to be right. I was recently retired, so there was no reason I couldn’t fit it in. The scenery was beautiful, the foothills of the Los Padres National Forest in South Central California. The problem turned out to be the fat that I wanted to burn off. I was more than 50 pounds overweight and it was too much for my knees. Because it had been more than ten years since the last time I tried jogging I decided to take it easy and jog every other day. Everything was fine the first week, although I noticed my knees and a number of muscles that hadn’t been used in awhile where sore, that was to be expected. Then it hit me. The morning after the fourth time I jogged I could hardly walk my knees didn’t just hurt, they throbbed. They screamed, ‘Do Not Move Me!’ I waited two weeks and tried again, but the next morning the knee pain was back in full force.

Since then I’ve tried little bits and pieces of running a few times, just to do it, just to see what it felt like. I’ve lost quite a bit of the weight and am less than 20 pounds overweight now. The biggest thing I’ve noticed is that my legs feel heavy and it’s hard to move them very far, not because they hurt as much as because I just don’t have the lung capacity to push them very far. In the last couple years the best I’ve been able to do is a couple blocks non-stop, but usually, half a block and I’m winded. Still, I did it before, if my knees don’t rebel, it seems I should be able to do it again.

Today I jogged a little more than a mile incrementally: jog a 10th of a mile then walk a 10th, then jog at 10th and so on until I finished.

It was painful, to say the least.

Just before stretching and starting my cool down I took a selfie. I plan to do that every time I finished jogging. My goal is to have 250 selfie’s by the end of the year that means I jog roughly 5 times a week.

I found this quite inspirational and the reason that I started jogging again. Yesterday I watched a video by HubSpot’s Beth Dunn about persistence. These are four pictures of Beth. She tried losing weight many times a number of different ways but wasn’t successful till she found a way to hold herself accountable.

At the end of every jog, she took a selfie. Taking that selfie every day gave her an additional reason to continue jogging every day.

As you can see from the pictures below it worked. The first picture was her before she started jogging in 2012. The next is about a year later on stage at the Inbound event where she is 75 lbs lighter. Next is a picture at the event the following year, then this past November.

We usually want change such as weight loss to be quick, but as you can see Beth’s weight loss wasn’t immediate, but with persistence, it became drastic, life-changing.

If I jog just about every day and take a selfie every day I see no reason the process shouldn’t work for me, too.

Below is the full text of Ashley Judd’s version of Nina Donavan’ spoken poem, “I Am a Nasty Woman.”

“I am a nasty woman.

I’m not as nasty as a man who looks like he bathes in Cheeto dust. A man whose words are a distract to America; Electoral College-sanctioned hate speech contaminating this national anthem.

I am not as nasty as Confederate flags being tattooed across my city. Maybe the South actually is gonna rise again; maybe for some it never really fell. Blacks are still in shackles and graves just for being Black. Slavery has been reinterpreted as the prison system in front of people who see melanin as animal skin.

I am not as nasty as a swastika painted on a pride flag. And I didn’t know devils could be resurrected, but I feel Hitler in these streets—a moustache traded for a toupee; Nazis renamed the cabinet; electro-conversion therapy the new gas chambers, shaming the gay out of America turning rainbows into suicide notes.

I’m not as nasty as using little girls like Pokémon before their bodies have even developed.

I am not as nasty as your own daughter being your favourite sex symbol—like your wet dreams infused with your own genes.

But yah, I am a nasty woman?!

A loud vulgar, proud woman.

I’m not nasty like the combo of Trump and Pence being served up to me in my voting booth.

I’m nasty like the battles my grandmothers fought to get me into that voting booth.

I’m nasty like the fight for wage equality. Scarlett Johansson: Why were the famous actors paid less than half of what the male actors earned last year?

See, even when we do go into higher paying jobs our wages are still cut with blades, sharpened by testosterone. Why is the work of a Black woman and a Hispanic woman worth only 63 and 54 cents of a white man’s privileged daughter?

This is not a feminist myth. This is inequality.

So we are not here to be debunked. We are here to be respected. We are here to be nasty.

I am nasty like the blood stains on my bed sheets. We don’t actually choose if and when to have our periods. Believe me, if we could, some of us would. We don’t like throwing away our favourite pairs of underpants. Tell me, why are tampons and pads still taxed when Viagra and Rogaine are not? Is your erection really more than protecting the sacred messy part of my womanhood? Is the blood stain on my jeans more embarrassing than the thinning of your hair?

I know it is hard to look at your own entitlement and privilege. You may be afraid of the truth. I am unafraid to be honest. It may sound petty bringing up a few extra cents. It adds up to the pile of change I have yet to see in my country.

And our pussies ain’t for grabbin’. Therefore, reminding you that are balls are stronger than America’s ever will be. Our pussies are for our pleasure. They are for birthing new generations of filthy, vulgar, nasty, proud, Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, Sheikh—you name it—for new generations of nasty women. So if you [are] a nasty woman or love one who is, let me hear you say, hell yeah!”